Somehow, we’ve come to expect creative people to work alone. Yet many of the most successful of us seek out, commit to, and cherish relationships with other artists who help us with our work…. the fantasy of self-sufficiency can be a trap. With rare exceptions, creative people of all kinds like to be around others.

Why, then, would so many people subscribe to the false idea of the “solitary, tormented genius”?

I first got to know Tim Tingle when I moved to Oklahoma in 2004. After my wife Pam and I had spent time with Tim in several contexts, he invited us to attend the Choctaw Nation’s annual Labor Day Festival in the tribal capitol, Tvshka Homma (Tuscahoma), Oklahoma.

Pam and I had the great privilege there of meeting some of the elders who had taught Tim his stories. But most of all, we got a glimpse of some unspoken parts of Choctaw culture.

A case in point: we heard many stories from Tim and from his friends about the jokes they had played on Tim...

At the recent National Storytelling Conference in Kansas City, I had the amazing honor of being given the Lifetime Achievement Award - the highest honor given in the U.S. storytelling community.

I was allowed just a few minutes to address the gathering. Since this was a once-in-a-lifetime moment, I tried to give the essence of what I most want to pass on, after over four decades as a storyteller, author, teacher, and coach. So here’s what I said...

Carol Dweck discovered children who loved to fail - because, in their mindset, failure was a chance to get smarter. But our society seems to favor the fixed mindset, in which your smartness is innate and unchanging. Why is that? What role does it play, to keep people imprisoned in a fixed mindset? Is there something storytelling can do, to help others experience the exciting potential of a "growth mindset"?

Many of us feel darkness surrounding us socially, as well as physically. We feel the lengthening shadows of intolerance, scapegoating, and bigotry. These dark forces seem ascendant. How can we possibly remain hopeful?

South Africa’s Desmond Tutu, no stranger to such situations, said this:

"Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness."

So where is this reputed “light”?

Precious Brightness

Novelist Kate DiCamillo, in her acclaimed novel (later made into an animated film) The Tale of Desperaux, points to a form of light familiar to every reader of this article...

It’s seldom remembered, but an event in Paris in 1790 introduced a concept that made possible nearly every manufactured object sold in the world today. And, oddly, it led indirectly to unhelpful practices in teaching storytelling.

An Astonishing Feat

In Paris's historic Hotel des Invalides in 1790, Honore Blanc, an inventor and gunsmith, staged a daring demonstration in front of a crowd of prestigious politicians, academics, and military men. Until that time, firearms were built individually. Each part of each gun was separately shaped by hand; no two were identical, so replacement parts had to be laboriously crafted to match each unique broken one. This made repairing a gun almost as difficult as making one in the first place.

But Blanc had a bold, new plan: he had manufactured 1000 gunlocks (the critical part of the gun, which causes the gunpowder to explode, firing the bullet) that were made of identical parts. In front of the startled crowd, he chose one of each gunlock-part randomly from bins, then assembled them into a working gunlock. Then he repeated his feat again and again for the astonished crowd. Blanc had just demonstrated the potential of interchangeable parts...

Storytelling Enters Society’s Bloodstream

When I began calling myself a professional storyteller in 1976, I found myself riding a wave that others had created, a wave that was later called the “storytelling revival.” That very year, eminent child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had just published The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Three years before, the first National Storytelling Festival had been held in Jonesborough, TN.

...as I began this endeavor, I saw storytelling as a possible antibody to the commercialism, competition, and materialism that had infected the bloodstream of our society. We were few, but we believed our effect on society would be good.